Sir Philip Sidney: A Sonnet

Sonnet XXXI
"With how sad steps, O Moone, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wanne a face!
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharpe arrowes tries?
Sure, if that long-with-Love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a Lover's case;
I read it in thy lookes; thy languisht grace
To me that feele the like, thy state descries.
Then, even of fellowship, O Moone, tell me,
Is constant Love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet
Those Lovers scorn whom that Love doth possesse?
Do they call vertue there, ungratefulnesse?"
 - Sir Philip Sidney



 

Of all poems, the sonnet should be read and treasured and widely available.  The word comes from Old Provencal (sonet) by way of Italian (sonetto) and it is a little poem or song.  But in a misplaced zeal to clear the shelves of unnecessary volumes, libraries are selling off insufficiently circulated items on the theory that they have lost their value to readers who may not even know of their existence because they are unfashionable.  I was searching for George Meredith's 50-sonnet sequence Modern Love, a book I had borrowed several times but not recently enough, only to find that it was gone.  Originally published in 1862, Meredith, an English poet and novelist, detailed the disintegration of his his marriage to Mary Ellen Peacock, daughter of poet Thomas Love Peacock, and his distress when she left him for another man.  I consoled myself with another old favorite, Astrophel and Stella (Starlover and Stars), written during the 1580s  by the Elizabethan poet Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586).

Astrophel and Stella (Starlover and Star), published in 1591, was the first great Elizabethan sonnet sequence, second only to Shakespeare's. In it, through self-revelation, Sidney ripped the mask off the Petrarch-ian sonnet. He had not intended his sonnets to be published so that may explain their intimate tone.  Fortunately for us, his friends saved them from oblivion, publishing the sonnets after his death.  Henri Etienne called Sidney  vir generosus, 'a man ‘in all ways generous.’ (Geneva: 1576) and his works is that, too.  Unusually for a child of noble privilege Sidney  took generous care of the people who worked for him, even giving money to a blind harpist at the tender age of eleven.  

The self that Sidney revealed is his poetry is conflicted and inspired by what Robert Browning described in Joocoseria (1883) as “Never the time and the place./ And the loved one all together.” 

Philip Sidney had known Penelope Deveraux since childhood. So it was not unusual that Penelope was eventually suggested as a bride for for the young man but in the Elizabethan fashion, wealth and rank outweighed mutual attraction on the marriage scales.  Penelope’s marriage in 1582 turned out to be an unhappy one,  Her husband, Lord Rich, treated her cruelly and, after Sidney’s death, Penelope was able to obtain a divorce. The poet’s friends averred that she had loved him.  Sidney though, had apparently dithered about courting her , only to  suffer the sharp sting of regret after she married someone else; the experience was more than a poetic conceit to him.  Under the guise of a lovelorn shepherd Sidney felt free  to express his melancholy and sexual frustration. 

Sonnet XXXI is unforgettable from its first line, alhtough  verging on the ungrammatical ("With how sad steps"), a strange and riveting ode to the moon. Sidney who  claimed in his Defence of Poesy  that  "The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth," is also  a turner of tables, ultimately by suggesting darkly that those who receive love without returning it are ungrateful rather than virtuous.

These poets and also St. Bonaventure, whose Itinerarium mentis in Deum of 1259 contains the following  sentiment, are our familiars. Their poems may sound slightly strange to our 21st century but they belong to us.

" But if we regard speech with a view to its aim, it serves to express, to teach, and to move.  But it always expresses something by means of an image, it teaches by means of a force of light."  

Image:

Earl Reed (1863-1931) - The Moon in the Marsh, undated, Art Institute of Chicago.

Feuillevert: William Dean Howells & John Greenleaf Whittier

 “I was beginning to speak of the famous poets I knew when Garfield stopped me with ‘Just a minute!’  He ran down into the grassy space, first to one fence and then to the other at the sides, and waved a wild arm of invitation to the neighbors….’Come over here!’ he shouted.  ‘He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!’ and at his bidding forms began to mount the fences and follow him up to his veranda. ‘Now go on!’ he called to me, when we were all seated, and I went on, while the whippoorwills whirred and whistled round, and the hours drew toward midnight.” - William Dean Howells, from Years Of My Youth (1916)

As many times as I have read this paragraph, it never fails to make me catch my breath in wonder.    American poets in the 19th century, including those referenced above (Oliver Wendell Holmes [1809-1894], Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-1882], James Russell Lowell [1819-1891] and John Greenleaf Whittier [1807-1892] ) had an intimate relationship with their readers' lives, without benefit of radio, television, or the internet.  Their works were taught in schools, memorized for pleasure and education, and presented at public occasions of all sorts, from family gatherings to patriotic holidays.   
"(T)o try to figure out what the poem means, as much as what the poem means in our lives" is how Joan Shelley Rubin describes what has changed in how we read poetry today.  Rubin says that our reading has become less personal.  That may be why this story of poets on a summer night seems like a dream.

Howells, as editor of Harper’s, wrote for the magazine in March of 1902 about the importance of “that great reading world with which the small writing world is really so little in touch.”

I want to borrow an idea from another poet, the much-missed Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) who described Beethoven's music as "music without the ghost of  another person in it" to describe the self-examining world of our contemporary poets. What is lost and what is gained by this change?

In the summer of 1870, James A, Garfield (1831-1881) was almost half way through his eighteen years as a member of Congress. Garfield would be elected as the 20^th President of the United States in 1880 but, in the event, he served in office for only 200 days;   assassinated on September 19, 1881.

Garfield was raised on an Ohio farm by his widowed mother.  The family had little money, so the young Garfield worked at a series of jobs to earn enough to attend Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, After graduating in 1856, he moved back to Hiram where he became the president of Western Reserve Eclectic Institute.

William Dean Howells (1837-1920) had become an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, just years earlier by one of the magazine's founders, John Greenleaf Whittier.  Howells would become a respected novelist, with the publication of Their Wedding Journey in 1872.

Whittier, the poet whose middle name Greenleaf derives from the French word feuillevert (green leaf) was color blind.   He grew up on a a farm in Haverhill, Massachusetts as part of a large and extended family.  Descended from Huguenot immigrants, the American Whittiers became Quakers and, not surprisingly fro their time, supporters of the anti-abolitionist movement.  Whittier's first poem was published without his knowledge when his sister sent it to William Lloyd Garrison at the Newburyport Free Press in 1824.  Whittier had little education but, with encouragement from Garrison, he earned money as a shoemaker that helped pay his tuition at the Haverhill Academy.  In his works Whittier's great themes were compassion and social responsibility.  Today, a bridge over the Merrimack River that connects Newburyport to Amesbury, where Whitter is buried, bears his name.

To read more:

1.Years Of My Youth by William Dean Howells was originally published in 1916 by Harper & Brother of New York  and reprinted most recently by Indian University Press at Bloomington in 1975.

2. Songs of Ourselves:the uses of poetry in America by Joan Shelley Rubin, Cambridge, Belknap Press, Harvard University: 2007.

3. John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography by Roland H. Woodwell, Haverhill, Trustees of the John Greenleaf Whittier Homestead: 1985.

Image;
1. unidentified photographer - The James & Lucretia Garfield home, 6825 Hinsdale Street,  Hiram, Ohio, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus.

Frida Kahlo, the Philosopher

It's back, although its authenticity is still unverified. 
Even if Frida Kahlo didn't say this, it would be nice to think that she did.